Read it.

While remote work has enabled some people to relocate from expensive metro areas, many of the smaller cities and towns they went to have quickly developed housing shortages of their own.

America wasn’t always like this — we once built all those countless cities and towns, after all.

A common thread: American towns and cities are no longer able to adapt to new residents as they once were, thanks to rigid zoning codes and tangled bureaucracy that makes infrastructure cost far more than it does in Europe or Asia. Even a simple bus lane can take over a decade to implement. And trying to change this can result in endless political fights.

So what if we just started new cities?

What if we just got rid of zoning regulations? Houston demonstrates that not even big cities really need them.

Read it.

Union + Minimum Wage -> Automation

Pretty soon the Democrat base will be all robots.

Zelenskyy says Ukraine invasion only the beginning; another apparent mass grave found near Mariupol (CNBC)

Russian General Lets Slip a Secret Plan to Invade Moldova and Seize Ukraine’s Entire Coastline (Daily Beast) My rule of thumb is, if the Daily Beast says it, you know it isn’t true.

Despite U.S. sanctions, oil traders help Russian oil reach global markets (NPR)

Why the U.S. is going after yachts and mansions of Russian billionaire oligarchs (CNBC) Because that’s where the money is?

Putin Tells EU Chief That Kiev Not Allowing Azov Militants To Surrender In Mariupol

Ukrainian Tennis Star Demands Russian Players Be Subjected To Ideological Purity Test

The city stopping the fall of south Ukraine

Indonesia Bans Edible Oil Exports, Sparks “Mayhem” As Global Food Crisis Ahead 

Kill the Tank: America’s Javelin Missile Is Second to None

Russian Diamond Flow To India Stops As US Sanctions Cause Gem Chaos 

Finland Says Will Likely Submit Application For NATO Membership In Coming Weeks  And Putin has only himself to blame.

The Russia-NATO Cyber War Is Escalating Fast

NATO & Russian Military Presence In Mediterranean Sea At Cold War Levels

Germany’s Scholz Resists Sending “Quickly Available” Tanks To Ukraine: ‘Could Lead To Nuclear War’

Liberals, Conservatives, and Russia: the Drama Triangle

Buchanan: First Priority – Avoid US War With Russia

“It is important to be open minded, but not so open minded that one’s brain falls out.” – Richard Feynman

Read it.

Imagine a world in which we could take care of our friends’ kids when they need to pop out, because our friends live a stone’s throw away. A world where any time you wanted to head out for a quick drink there would be a friend within ten minutes’ walk to go with. A world where you can easily get a pal over to set up a barbecue, or where you can play board games or have supper with friends on the slightest whim. Why don’t we live in that world already?

I live in London, a pretty large city. When I want to see my friends I often have to travel 45 minutes or an hour across town to do so. This level of latency is pretty annoying. Imagine how many Friends plotlines would have been broken if they hadn’t always been agglomerating across the hall from one another or in Central Perk.

This is much easier to do if everybody is renting in a dense urban area instead of owning homes in the suburbs, which is more usually the case.

Read it.

Now that’s comedy.

Against my natural inclination I’m starting to like Justin Hammer Elon Musk.

*sigh* I ought not to need to do this but …

• If it’s Right, it isn’t New. The whole point of Right is to be not-New.
• If it’s New, it isn’t Right. Yes, I’m looking at YOU, Jonah Goldberg.

That’s all you really need to know.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

Eggs or yogurt, veggies or potato chips? We make decisions about what to eat every day, but those choices may not be fully our own. New University of Pittsburgh research on mice shows for the first time that the microbes in animals’ guts influence what they choose to eat, making substances that prompt cravings for different kinds of foods.

“We all have those urges — like if you ever you just feel like you need to eat a salad or you really need to eat meat,” said Kevin Kohl, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “Our work shows that animals with different compositions of gut microbes choose different kinds of diets.”

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

This essay represents a “conspiracy theory” (or better, a conspiracy hypothesis) about the uses of the term “conspiracy theory” itself. I acknowledge that the term is one of the most potent epithets that can be hurled at a writer or speaker, that it is mostly used to delegitimize and dismiss its target, and that it serves not only to discredit the claim that a writer or speaker makes but also the very investigation into purported conspiracies. The phrase represents a condensed, shorthand means of labeling a claim negatively and humiliating the claimant, disqualifying the claimant and the claim a priori. Likewise, in writing of the “conspiracy” behind the use of the phrase, I am hereby opening myself up to the charge of “conspiracy theory.”

Not all actions-in-concert are the result of conscious conspiracy. People who hold the same values and believe the same lies about their opponents will pretty much always act the same way in any particular situation. This is why doing otherwise is so remarkable.

US Treasury secretary and other finance ministers walk out of G20 meeting with Russia (CNN) Russia is the New South Africa.

US congressman urges Biden to ban six UK lawyers for ‘enabling’ oligarchs (The Guardian) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Russian billionaire blasts Putin’s invasion (CNN) That won’t stop them from stealing his stuff.

US “Always Preparing The Next” Weapons Package For Ukraine: Biden Official

MSNBC: DeSantis, Youngkin Just Like Russians Who ‘Rape Children’ in Ukraine

Ukraine Attacks Civilian Targets in Russia?

Five Eyes nations fear wave of Russian attacks against critical infrastructure

China & Russia Pledge Deepened Strategic Ties ‘No Matter What’

Greenwald: Former Intel Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big-Tech Monopoly Power Vital To National Security

To Fight Russia, Europe’s Regimes Risk Impoverishment & Recession

China Doubles Russian Coking Coal Imports As Rest Of World Shuns Moscow

Germans Told To Take Fewer Showers As Energy Costs Bite

On Facebook, Denying Russian Atrocities in Bucha Is More Popular Than the Truth

Russia Expels 36 EU Diplomats After About 400 Russian Officials Booted From Europe

WINNING: A Trillion Dollar Tragedy

‘Black Hole’ – White House Doesn’t Know Where US Weapons Go After Entering Ukraine

Apple Pay in Russia: Suspension of service leads to lawsuit against iPhone maker

SpaceX shut down a Russian electromagnetic warfare attack in Ukraine

Russian law firm plans to sue Apple over removal of Apple Pay

“So Not Even A Fly Can Escape”: Putin Declares Mariupol ‘Liberated’ – Orders Besieged Steel Plant Sealed Off

Oil Jumps As “Second Wave Of Russian Oil Shock” Begins

Meet ‘Phoenix Ghost,’ the US Air Force’s new drone designed for Ukraine’s war with Russia

UPDATE: Sports Media Reacts To Wimbledon Ban Of Russians

Russia Closes Multiple Baltic Consulates – Cites Arms Transfers To Ukraine  What took them so long?

The Antiplanner is a wet blanket.

Sightline Institute researcher Michael Andersen offers Willamette Week readers “five ways to make [housing] cheaper.” Sounds good, except none of them will work.

Tell the truth: You’ve always wanted to do that.

Armor: Tanks As Weapons Not Targets

Former Russian foreign minister reveals precisely when Putin may pull trigger on nuclear weapons

Natural gas surges to highest level since 2008 as Russia’s war upends energy markets (CNBC)

Inside The Ukraine-Induced Defense Contractor ‘Gold Rush’ At The Pentagon

To Arm or Not to Arm?

Wargame Simulating the Sinking of the Moskva

Explaining Germany’s Russian Gas Problem

IMF Slashes Global Growth Outlook, Blames Putin; Fears ‘Social Unrest’ & ‘Global Instability’

Lavrov Denies Russia Could Use Nukes In Ukraine

AirPods looted by Russians giving away their location via Find My  Now that’s comedy.

“Battle Of Donbas” In Full Swing As Russia Launches ‘Hellish’ All-Out Assault

EU’s Hope To Rely On LNG Is Weak Point In Plan To Wean Off Of Russian Gas

Russia Must Prepare For “Possible Aggressive Action” From NATO, Putin Advisor Says

EU To Impose Full Embargo On Russian Oil Next Week, Will Send Price Above $185 According To JPMorgan  Those of us who own shares in oil MLPs appreciate the heads-up, so we can stock up.

Russian Ambassador To US Says Biden Officials Won’t Speak With Him  Of course not – not until Biden’s poll numbers start going back up.

On Ukraine: being wrong over and over doesn’t seem to stop Colonel Macgregor

Russia Tells Azov Fighters Trapped In Giant ‘Fortress’ Steel Plant: “Lay Down Arms Or We’ll Level Everything”

The Tank Is Dead: Long Live the Javelin, the Switchblade, the … ?

Climateer blows the whistle.

My topic for today: All numbers are wrong.

Like, seriously. Whenever you see a number – in a tweet, newspaper headline, office email, technical report, textbook, anywhere – assume it is wrong. Treat it as enemy misinformation, deliberate sabotage of your understanding of the world, and disregard it.

You’re thinking, ha ha, I’m exaggerating for effect. I’m not. Seriously I am not. I mean, of course not not all numbers are literally incorrect; but it happens so very, very much more often than your intuition, that I do literally mean it is a good practice to treat all numbers as incorrect by default.

I’ve come to this position slowly, over the years, one screwup at a time. But now that I’ve really started paying attention, the mistakes are everywhere.

Read it.

Easy to say – but who gets to pay for it? The taxpayer, of course.

Fund your own damned research.

Some days are better than others. We take our victories where we can.

Read it.

For many people nowadays, the first port of call upon discovering an unusual rash or feeling a worrying pain is not the doctor, but rather Google.

Considering the behavior of doctors throughout the Pandemic Panic, can you blame them?

Read it.

Small, deployable nuclear reactors, an idea that the United States military has been experimenting with for decades, will receive new life under a program the Defense Department announced Thursday.

And unlike previous efforts to deploy alternatives to diesel and other fossil-fuel generators, which were stalled by high costs and little political support, this new effort may succeed in helping the military, and eventually commercial energy providers, wean themselves off carbon-intensive power. As one expert explained, while the physics haven’t changed, increasing concerns about the geopolitics of fossil fuels coupled with growing concerns about climate change have made the effort more critical.

Imagine the fights when localities try to set up one of these and the NIMBY/EcoNazi crowd attempt to regulate it to death:

But a number of nuclear scientists and watchdogs have questioned the need for such a device. In recent years, they have publishing scathing reports, commentary and analyses about the potential contamination should the reactor or its fuel be damaged during an attack, stolen or experience a catastrophic failure.

“Not only have my concerns not been alleviated, they’ve actually grown,” Professor Alan J. Kuperman told Military Times.

Calls for US to issue visa bans for UK lawyers enabling Russian oligarchs (The Guardian) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Russia’s Oil Industry Is Suffering As The West Shuns Its Crude

Europe has yet to hit Russia where it would hurt the most: banning its oil and gas  I guess some ‘journalists’ didn’t get the memo.

INTELLIGENCE: Epic Fails

Blinken: Ukraine War Will Last Through 2022

Mariupol Has Been “Wiped Off The Face Of The Earth,” Ukrainian Governor Says

Scott Adams (on his Locals podcast COFFEE WITH SCOTT ADAMS, which I highly recommend) points out that the reason Twitter has power in this world is that it has both Left and Right arguing with each other. If one side went away, it would just be one side talking to themselves and it would fail. (This is why the various right-wing alternatives to Twitter never succeed; nobody from the Left ever goes there, or ever will go there, so there is no chance of it ever having power.) This is why the Elon Musk thing is seen as such a threat — Mommeee! Billy hit me back!

Why do ‘right-wing’ people fight so hard not to Get Canceled on Twitter? Because they want to be on Twitter so badly that they’ll fight to be there, even when they are being regularly and routinely abused. It reminds me of the classic story of the guy whose job was shoveling up elephant shit all day. When somebody suggested that he go into another line of work, he responed ‘What? And give up show business?’ If this kind of ‘show business’ is so important to you that you are willing to spend your days shoveling up elephant shit, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU>

This is psychotic. Twitter (in its present form) is an stage for left-wing people to abuse right-wing people; the right-wing people are necessary for this process because their Role In Life is to serve as whipping-boys for the proglodytes. The same can be said of alleged ‘conservatives’ who accept invitations to appear on networks like CNN and MSNBC when everybody and his dog knows that the only reason for such an invitation is that it provides the Usual Suspects with a target for abuse. Why put up with that? A character defect is the only reason I can think of.

Conservatives, stop using Twitter. If you did, it would die, and yet another arena for the Left to abuse their natural victims would cease to exist. You have the key to Hell in your own hands; leave whenever you decide to do so. That’s all it takes.

Read it.

he central bank of France has covertly repatriated 221 tonnes of gold between 2013 and 2016. Since then, all its monetary gold is stored in La Souterraine in Paris. Repatriating all gold is related to France’s aim to revamp Paris as a gold trading center.

They used to keep their gold in New York just in case the Soviets invaded Western Europe. I guess that’s no longer a concern.

Freeberg nails it.

So, Elon has made his move on Twitter. And now we’re all talking about free speech, and those awful terrible billionaires doing…stuff.

This debate over “free speech” is about to drift over into “Yeah but what about truth?” The narrative is going to be that we can’t have speech that’s so free that people can sling about untrue things. So it’s like a hose, you see? Or a coffee filter. You can constrict it and be anti-free-speech, but if you open it up too much, a bunch of “disinformation” gets in there…so we have to find a happy medium.

Back up the truck. Before we even get there, let’s inspect this.

Read it.

“What happened to that guy?” A lot of us have asked this question in the past few years about columnists, pundits, and thinkers we’ve always agreed with, only to see them taking a wildly different tack. Next, we’ll ask, “Did I change or did they?” I know I’ve changed quite a bit, but to see influential conservatives pushing “the conservative case for voting Democrat/Promoting CRT and Queer Theory/censoring Republicans/etc.” remains tough to stomach.

Every time I see “The Conservative Case For [insert proglodyte scheme here]” I want to barf.

“It’s only a matter of time before the people with guns feel entitled to tell the people without guns what to do. That’s why the Second Amendment is so important.”  — Charlie Kirk

Joel Kotkin.

In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.

This view was widespread at the time, and has lingered well into the 21st century. Forget Houston. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the cities most frequently associated with the urban American dream.

Fast forward to today, however, and a new urban renaissance is taking shape — and this time, it’s in the heart of Texas. Never before in American history have two metros in one state — Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth — been in the nation’s five largest. So much for its cockroaches; at its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third largest municipality by 2030.

Why Putin’s invasion failed

More Than 100 Russian Jets Stranded In Dubai After Being Flown There To Escape Sanctions

Zelensky on NATO: ‘no longer interested in their diplomacy’ (The Hill)

Name the eight oligarchs given ‘golden visas’, demands Labour (The Guardian) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Bucha & Truth

China Undercuts Sanctions On Russia: Where Are The “Consequences”?

Russian Oil Continues To Flow To India And China

WINNING: Russian Recruiting Ruined

Ericsson pulls out of Russia ‘indefinitely’ to protest war in Ukraine

Russian Military Says It Successfully Destroyed S-300 Systems Provided By EU State

Finland and Sweden set to join NATO as soon as summer

Finland Set For NATO Entry As Soon As Summer – Russian Official Warns “Destruction Of Their Country” Coming

Ukraine War Meant To Stop US World Domination, Russia’s Top Diplomat Says

Read it.

Economists, politicians and business leaders, it seems, have given up on trying to imagine completely different economic systems. But we have not.

And neither has a small group of brainy, visionary science fiction authors: Cory Doctorow (peer production and abundance in Walkaway), Bruce Sterling (nomads + cheap open source technology + reputation servers in Distraction), Neal Stephenson (phyla in The Diamond Age), Peter Watts (tons of insights from biology in the Rifters trilogy), and others.

We organize a meeting of minds where we can learn from each other what future economies might look like. And maybe even how we can help bring them into the world.

Cory Doctorow is a proglodyte, and I’ve never heard of Peter Watts, but I’ll listen to whatever Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson have to say on any subject.

“All disinformation comes from either the media or the government. That’s it.”  — ZMan

Read it.

I have always wondered why nobody ever built a graphical programming lanuage (i.e. a language where, rather than coding in words, one dropped symbols on a ‘coding surface’ and connected them with symbols representing what you could do, such as branches and loops). The SQL Server Integration Services design tool does this to a certain degree, but only at a very high level.

Hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Read it.

Late last month, Donald Trump filed suit against the conspirators who conceived and propagated the falsehood that he had colluded with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Like most of Trump’s ventures, the suit is ambitious, even grandiose. Trump is suing, among others, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Marc Elias, the international law firm Perkins Cole, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, ABC, and other yet to be named media corporations. He is suing them for, among other things, injurious falsehood, computer fraud, theft of trade secrets, malicious prosecution, and violation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) act.

Most people can’t push back effectively when the Woke Mob comes for them because they can’t afford to pursue their formal legal remedeis. Trump, however, has deep pockets and doesn’t take shit from anybody.

Read it.

It’s hard to Follow The Science when they’re just making it up.

Hacker News.

I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion on inflation, as a result of an increased supply of money in the system. Some have suggested that the stimulus checks increased the supply of money which may have, in part, led to inflation. I’m curious, if the government instituted a universal basic income, would this lead to inflation?

PhD in econometrics speaking, here’s my handy guide to macro-economics:
– The main variables of interest are (aggregate) real production / income (GDP/GDI), unemployment and inflation (arguably in that order)
– Nobody knows much wrt the causes, effects and future trajectories of any of these. Not professional Ivy League economists who publish in journals like AER, QJE, JPE or Econometrica, nor traders getting paid millions at hedge funds or prop trading desks, nor fringe bloggers, gold/crypto-bugs or neophytes from different fields (traditionally from physics, but probably increasingly from CS/AI/ML). Especially beware when they sound very sure of themselves, often using correct wonky economic jargon or details like the plumbing of money flows. Top academic economist are at least (usually) somewhat honest that they know very very little.
– Even if someone did know anything, 3rd parties like you or I can’t distinguish the Real Truth from quackery.
– The root cause of this knowledge deficiency is the inability to run proper controlled experiments. Pretty much no theory about macro-economics is convincingly testable/falsifiable, except banal trivialities like we can’t make everybody rich by sending everyone a $10M check. This will not change in our lifetime, if ever.
– All the writing on macro-economics is story-telling and catering to their specific audiences. Academics write foremost for other academics to gain a position at a prestigious faculty (and incidentally to influence politics). Crypto-bugs write to sell you crypto-coins. Fringe bloggers like Shadowstats write to get newsletter signups and ad-dollars. Most of them employ the effective mechanism that the reader is initiated to advanced/semi-hidden knowledge, which makes the reader feel better about themselves.
Given this, the answer to your question is: maybe, maybe not, who knows?

The YCombinator Hacker News site often has more than the tech-related stuff you might expect. Highly recommended.

Read it.

These tiny satellites uncover daily images of climate change, Chinese labor camps, and hidden government areas – and make them publicly available.

We have the technology.